Verses Quotes - Page 12

• Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.

  Jonathan Swift

  Shining, Fiction, Poet

  Jonathan Swift (1860). “The Works of Jonathan Swift ...: With Copious Notes and Additions, and a Memoir of the Author”, p.430

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• His wet white face and miserable eyesBrought nurses to him more than groans and sighs:But hoarse and low and rapid rose and fellHis troubled voice: he did the business well.(First verse of Died of Wounds)

  Siegfried Sassoon

  Voice, White, Nurse

  Siegfried Sassoon, “Died Of Wounds”

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• And ever against eating cares Lap me in soft Lydian airs, Married to immortal verse

  John Milton

  Caring, Air, Pageantry

  'L'Allegro' (1645) l. 125

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• I've read The Satanic Verses and I thought it a nasty, sneering, free-thinking book... I can understand why the book is offensive and it didn't seem to me to be anything but offensive when I read it.

  Maurice Cowling

  Book, Thinking, Satanic

  "Singular Encounters" by Naim Attallah, Quartet Books, (p. 142), 1990.

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• The man is either mad or his is making verses.
  [Lat., Aut insanit homo, aut versus facit.]

  Horace

  Men, Mad, Poet

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• I was a poet too; but modern taste
  Is so refined and delicate and chaste,
  That verse, whatever fire the fancy warms,
  Without a creamy smoothness has no charms.
  Thus, all success depending on an ear,
  And thinking I might purchase it too dear,
  If sentiment were sacrific'd to sound,
  And truth cut short to make a period round,
  I judg'd a man of sense could scarce do worse
  Than caper in the morris-dance of verse.

  William Cowper

  Cutting, Men, Thinking

  William Cowper (1830). “Poems ... With a sketch of his life and a vindication of his religious principles and character. Third edition, corrected and enlarged. [With a portrait.]”, p.14

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• The last verse [In My Secret Life] completely got to me, about how we all have great ideals but in reality we end up conforming, following everyone else. We want to be stronger so we lead that life inside, thinking of ourselves as these great brave souls. I literally thought when I was 15 that I was a musical genius and I could change the world, but in fact you're not and you can't and you don't, and that realisation is almost heartbreaking.

  Katie Melua

  Reality, Thinking, Musical Genius

  "Katie Melua: I want to start afresh". The Telegraph, September 15, 2007.

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• Yes, the work comes out more beautiful from a material that resists the process, verse, marble, onyx, or enamel.

  Theophile Gautier

  Beautiful, Process, Materials

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• Walter [Cronkite] sang me a little sea chantey. The verse ended, 'Just watch your back with Dan [Rather], dear, just watch your back with Dan.'.

  Connie Chung

  Sea, Watches, Littles

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• Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter. But Horace's poetry has lasted longer than Jupiter's religion, and Jupiter himself has only survived because he disappeared into literature.

  Northrop Frye

  Long, Jupiter, Literature

  Northrop Frye, Germaine Warkentin (2006). “Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962”, p.447, University of Toronto Press

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• Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

  Eugenio Montale

  Today, Prose

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• How many chapters have been written about love verses - and how many more might be written! - might, would, could, should, or ought to be written! - I will venture to say, will be written!

  Samuel Lover

  Venture, Might, Chapters

  Samuel Lover (1842). “Handy Andy”, p.225

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• There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

  Eugenio Montale

  Writing, Connections, Poet

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• Cancel me not - for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Humorous, Two, Roots

  Stanislaw Lem (2002). “The Cyberiad”, p.57, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I wouldn't say I'm a very controlling person. For instance, when I talk to the actors, I don't tell them exactly what I want because I want them to surprise me. I even encourage them to change some of the verses of the script if they need to.

  Alejandro Amenabar

  Change, Needs, Actors

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• He that plays the king shall be welcome- his Majesty shall
  have tribute of me; the adventurous knight shall use his foil and
  target; the lover shall not sigh gratis; the humorous man shall
  end his part in peace; the clown shall make those laugh whose
  lungs are tickle o' th' sere; and the lady shall say her mind
  freely, or the blank verse shall halt fort.

  William Shakespeare

  Kings, Humorous, Men

  William Shakespeare (1867). “The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakspere: Comedies / ... Shakspere”, p.122

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• [Rhyme is] but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meter; ... Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme, ... as have also long since our best English tragedies, as... trivial and of no true musical delight; which [truly] consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory.

  John Milton

  Italian, Numbers, Long

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• My verses are my diary. My poetry is a poetry of proper names.

  Marina Tsvetaeva

  Names, Poetry, Diaries

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• Women are not apt to be won by the charms of verse.

  Bayard Taylor

  Charm, Wooing

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• The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower

  Michael Longley

  Gaps, Enormous, Good Poetry

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• One mark of good verse is surprise

  John Betjeman

  Surprise, Mark

  John Betjeman (2007). “Sweet Songs of Zion: Selected Radio Talks”

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• The word "Verse" is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification... the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Simple, Poetry, May

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• A verse may find him, who a sermon flies,
  And turn delight into a sacrifice.

  George Herbert

  Sacrifice, Delight, May

  "The Temple. Sacred poems and private ejaculations, etc".

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• The poet is born with the capacity of arranging words in such a way that something of the quality of the graces and inspirations he has received can make itself felt to other human beings in the white spaces, so to speak, between the lines of his verse. This is a great and precious gift; but if the poet remains content with his gift, if he persists in worshipping the beauty in art and nature without going on to make himself capable, through selflessness, of apprehending Beauty as it is in the divine Ground, then he is only an idolater.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Inspiration, White

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• On occasions, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon, there would be a flow into my mind with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza, accompanied, not preceded by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form a part of.... I say bubble up because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was the pit of the stomach.

  A. E. Housman

  Drinking, Beer, Two

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